Douglas Corrigan, 88, Dies; Wrong-Way Trip Was the Right Way toCelebrity as an Aviator

By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.

Published: December 14, 1995

Douglas Corrigan, a brash, errant aviator who captured the imagination of a Depression-weary public in 1938 when he took off from Brooklyn on a nonstop solo flight to Los Angeles and landed his improbable airplane in Dublin a day later, died on Saturday at a hospital in Orange, Calif. He was 88 and had been lionized for more than half a century as Wrong Way Corrigan.

The few people who were at Floyd Bennett Field when Mr. Corrigan took off at 5:15 on the morning of July 17, 1938, were baffled when the 31-year-old aviator turned into a cloud bank and disappeared to the east.

According to his flight plan, he should have been heading west.

As they and the world learned when his jerry-built, overloaded secondhand airplane touched down at Dublin's Baldonnel Airport 28 hours and 13 minutes later, Mr. Corrigan had not only known what he was doing, he had also flown straight into the hearts of the American people.

"I'm Douglas Corrigan," he told a group of startled Irish airport workers who gathered around him when he landed. "Just got in from New York. Where am I? I intended to fly to California."

Although he continued to claim with a more or less straight face that he had simply made a wrong turn and been led astray by a faulty compass, the story was far from convincing, especially to the American aviation authorities who had rejected his repeated requests to make just such a flight because his modified 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane was judged unworthy of more than an experimental aircraft certification.

Unmoved by evidence that he had not checked weather reports for the North Atlantic before his flight and had carried charts showing only his supposedly planned route to California, the authorities deemed his plane so unsafe and his flight so illegal that it took a 600-word official telegram to detail all the regulations he had violated.

But if Mr. Corrigan had such a twinkle in his eye when he told his story that he appeared to be trying to suppress a wink, the authorities had trouble stifling a wink of their own.

Although his pilot's license was instantly suspended, Mr. Corrigan, who returned to the United States by ship, did not miss a minute of flying time. He served the entire suspension at sea. The license was reinstated as soon as he and his crated-up plane sailed into New York Harbor aboard the liner Manhattan on Aug. 4, and received a tumultuous greeting.

There was an even larger welcome the next day when an estimated one million New Yorkers lined lower Broadway for a ticker-tape parade that eclipsed the one given for Charles A. Lindbergh after his solo flight to Paris in 1927.

Mr. Corrigan's 3,150-mile flight was an immediate sensation, pushing depressing economic news and grim international reports aside on the front pages of American newspapers and dominating radio broadcasts across the country.

Although half a dozen well-known pilots, among them Amelia Earhart and Wylie Post, had made solo flights across the Atlantic since Lindbergh had blazed the trail in the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927, none struck such a chord with the American people as Mr. Corrigan did.

That was partly because he was seen as an engaging and impish young pilot who had boldly thumbed his nose at authority, then baldly denied it, and partly because he had made the flight not in a state of the art aircraft with cutting edge instruments, but in a rickety plane so precariously patched together that it was variously dubbed an airborne crate and a flying jalopy.

Among other things, Mr. Corrigan, who had bought the plane in New York as a wreck for $310 in 1935 and nursed it cow pasture by cow pasture back to California, had ripped out the original 90-horsepower engine and replaced it with a 165-horsepower model cobbled together from two old Wright engines. He had also installed five extra fuel tanks, which completely blocked his forward view, and various parts, including the cabin door, were held together with baling wire.

Mr. Corrigan, who was born in Galveston, Tex., and grew up in Los Angeles, had been dreaming of a flight across the Atlantic for a long time. Enchanted with aviation at an early age, he had become a barnstorming pilot, flying instructor and an aviation mechanic who helped build Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis in San Diego. It was Mr. Corrigan, in fact, who pulled the chocks away from the wheels when Lindbergh took off from San Diego on his flight to New York in 1927.

Mr. Corrigan, who had speculated openly with friends about making an unauthorized trans-Atlantic flight, flew his plane to New York on July 10, 1938, setting a solo nonstop record of 27 hours, 50 minutes for the 2,700-mile flight.

When he took off a week later, ostensibly to return to California after accepting his failure to win permission for a trans-Atlantic flight, he carried a few chocolate bars, two boxes of fig crackers and a quart of water.

Within months of his feat he had made a triumphant American tour, endorsed wrong-way products like a watch that ran backward and signed lucrative contracts for an autobiography and a movie, "The Flying Irishman," in which he played himself.

He was a test pilot during World War II and later operated an air freight service. In the 1950's, he bought an orange grove in Santa Ana, Calif., but was forced to sell most of it in the 1960's. His wife, Elizabeth, died in 1966.

After a son was killed in a plane crash on Catalina Island in 1972 he became increasingly reclusive, until 1988 when he was lured back into the limelight by an offer to display his plane at an air show.

Mr. Corrigan, who had taken it apart in 1940 and stored it in his garage, was so enthusiastic that the show's organizers became alarmed.

Although Mr. Corrigan had not flown since 1972, the organizers found it prudent to station guards on the plane's wings during his appearance at the exhibition and even discussed anchoring the tail of the plane by rope to a police car.

He is survived by two sons, Douglas, of Santa Ana, and Harry, of Apex, N.C., and a sister, Evelyn, of Santa Ynez, Calif.